40% will abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load.

52% of online shoppers say quick page loads are important for their loyalty to a site.

But the average website load speed has increased 22% this year, according to a report by Radware.

It now takes 7.72 seconds to load—a far cry from the two-second limit of your average user.

Clearly, speeding up your website is critical—not just to ranking well with Google, but to keep your bottom-line profits high. So today, I’m going in-depth, sharing 10 things you can do to shave seconds off your site speed and enjoy higher profits to boot.

10 things you can do to speed up your site

1. Minimize HTTP Requests

According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different pieces-parts of the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render.

That being the case, the quickest way to improve site speed is to simplify your design.

Streamline the number of elements on your page.

Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.

Combine multiple style sheets into one.

Reduce scripts and put them at the bottom of the page.

Always remember, when it comes to your website, leaner is better.

Pro Tip: Start a campaign to reduce the number of components on each page. By doing this, you reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to make the page render—and you’ll significantly improve site performance.

2. Reduce server response time

Your target is a server response time of less than 200ms (milliseconds). And if you follow the tips in this article, you’re well on your way to achieving this.

Yslow – to evaluate your site’s speed and get tips on how to improve performance.

Google’s PageSpeed Tools – to learn more about performance best-practice and automate the process.

3. Enable compression

Large pages (which is what you could have if you’re creating high-quality content) are often 100kb and more. As a result, they’re bulky and slow to download. The best way to speed their load time is to zip them—a technique called compression.

Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response. You do this with a tool called Gzip.

Most web servers can compress files in Gzip format before sending them for download, either by calling a third-party module or using built-in routines. According to Yahoo, this can reduce download time by about 70%.

And since 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that support Gzip, it’s a great option for speeding up your site.

Pro Tip: Read this article for more details on Gzip compression. Then set up your server to enable compression:

4. Enable browser caching

When you visit a website, the elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage, so the next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.

The first time someone comes to your website, they have to download the HTML document, stylesheets, javascript files and images before being able to use your page. That may be as many as 30 components and 2.4 seconds.

Once the page has been loaded and the different components stored in the user’s cache, only a few components needs to be downloaded for subsequent visits.

In Theurer’s test, that was just three components and .9 seconds, which shaved nearly 2 seconds off the load time.

Theurer says that 40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache, so it’s critical that you make your page fast for these first-time visitors. But you also need to enable caching to shave time off subsequent visits.

Static resources should have a cache lifetime of at least a week. For third-party resources like ads or widgets, they should have a cache lifetime of at least one day.

For all cacheable resources (JS and CSS files, image files, media files, PDFs, etc.), set Expires to a minimum of one week, and preferably up to one year in the future. Don’t set it to more than one year in the future because that violates the RFC guidelines.

5. Minify Resources

WYSIWYG resources make it easy to build a Web page, but they sometimes create messy code—and that can slow your website considerably.

Since every unnecessary piece of code adds to the size of your page, it’s important that you eliminate extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation in your code so your pages are as lean as possible.

It also helps to minify your code. Here’s Google’s recommendation:

To minify HTML, you can use PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension to generate an optimized version of your HTML code. Run the analysis against your HTML page and browse to the ‘Minify HTML’ rule. Click on ‘See optimized content’ to get the optimized HTML code.

To minify JavaScript, try the Closure Compiler, JSMin or the YUI Compressor. You can create a build process that uses these tools to minify and rename the development files and save them to a production directory.

6. Optimize images

With images, you need to focus on three things: size, format and the src attribute.

Image size

Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important that you keep your images as small as possible. Use image editing tools to:

Crop your images to the correct size. For instance, if your page is 570px wide, resize the image to that width. Don’t just upload a 2000px-wide image and set the width parameter (width=”570”). This slows your page load time and creates a bad user experience.

Reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level.

Remove image comments.

Image format

JPEG is your best option.

PNG is also good, though older browsers may not fully support it.

GIFs should only be used for small or simple graphics (less than 10×10 pixels, or a color palette of 3 or fewer colors) and for animated images.

Do not use BMPs or TIFFs.

Src attribute

Once you’ve got the size and format right, make sure the code is right too. In particular, avoid empty image src codes.

In HTML, the code for an image includes this:

<img src=””>

When there’s no source in the quotation marks, the browser makes a request to the directory of the page or to the actual page itself. This can add unnecessary traffic to your servers and even corrupt user data.

Pro Tip: Take time to re-size your images before uploading them. And always include the src attribute with a valid URL.

7. Optimize CSS Delivery

CSS holds the style requirements for your page. Generally, your website accesses this information in one of two ways: in an external file, which loads before your page renders, and inline, which is inserted in the HTML document itself.

The external CSS is loaded in the head of your HTML with code that looks something like this:

Avoid including CSS in HTML code, such as divs or your headings (like the inline CSS pictured above). You get cleaner coding if you put all CSS in your external stylesheet.

8. Prioritize above-the-fold content

Having just recommended that you use only one CSS stylesheet and no inline CSS, there is one caveat you need to consider. You can improve user experience by having your above-the-fold (top of the page) load faster—even if the rest of the page takes a few seconds to load.

Pro Tip: Consider splitting your CSS into two parts: a short inline part that styles above-the-fold elements, and an external part that can be deferred.

DON’T MISS OUT

Kathryn Aragon is the former editor of The Daily Egg. She's a content strategist and consultant on mission to help content marketers get measurable results from their content. Learn more at KathrynAragon.com. Follow her on Twitter.

191 COMMENTS

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I don’t believe #8 is true. What defines what is above or below the fold. Website designers nowadays cannot control where the fold falls on visitor’s screen.s People have different size monitors, different resolution, different browsers. On top of that and not everyone keeps their browsers maximized. Add to that mobile devices. Content will shift based on the above and there’s never a definite answer of what’s above the fold.

Thank you for sharing very useful info. I have been searching lately on how to reduce the load time of my site and your 10 tips, well some of them actually helped increasing the response time of site. Well as some others are too techie for me to follow. Would appreciate if you can share any good plugins that can do all at once 🙂

Great post ! I personally implemented most the techniques suggested by you on my site but few factors like “optimizing CSS delivery” and “minifying resources” was a bit technically complicated for me . Anyway the idea here were pretty cool. Thanks 🙂

Minifying CSS and using a CDN don’t have to be complicated. While I’d recommend a gulp or grunt task runner (which can be complicated) you can find a CSS minification tool online where you copy/paste your CSS into a form and it will give you the minfied CSS. Save that to a new file (mysite.min.css) and include it on your homepage instead. Regarding a CDN, if you’re using something like jQuery or Bootstrap on your site, you can reference them from a cdn (like cdnjs or googleapis) rather than referencing the file from your site. Good luck.

Hi Niel,
I have a heavy website which take much time to load, it is around 9-10 seconds but i want to decrease page load time. I want to know that what should it be and how much effect it will users. Please suggest me, i am waiting

I’m not so sure I agree with using CSS instead of images to speed up your website. Maybe in some instances. But the CPU renders CSS and it has to parse your CSS before it does so. Depending how much CSS you are using like opacity, box shadows, and so on, it has to paint it every time something happens. This is why a lot of times when beginners try to make responsive sites, they are slow.

Nowadays, only few websites are having problems with slow page loading. I bet they must have considered what you’ve mentioned in this article. And definitely will apply these to speed up my website. Thanks!

Also we have linked to this blog from our ecommerce conversions blog post here (teamprojectmayhem.com/blog/quick-e-commerce-fixes-that-can-significantly-increase-your-conversions/?id=spooon) as a resource for load time fixes.

Most helpful post I’ve read in a while. I try to use more CSS than Images. I think I did a pretty good job in making the website appealing with different colors instead of pictures. The home page loads within 2 seconds 🙂

Thanks a milion of that article, please advise if there is any site could make analysis of the my site yallabook.com and advise how to speed it, it takes more than 9 sec. my web developer say it fine but i feel something wrong.

I’m new to this optimization thing and tested my site with several speed testers (giftofspeed.com and gtmetrix.com) and just now realize how slow my site actually is. I’ve implemented some of your tips and I’ve already sped my site up by 50%!! Just wanted to say thanks!

Thanks a lot Kathryn for this great article.. such a great explanation and solutions.. I am sure this will help me a lot in reducing my site load time… because website load time is what make or break your online presence especially when you are in a competitve market like news, entertainment or sports for instance..

Hi Kathryn, thanks for the insigth, our website had a good speed but it got better, we are determined to push the limits of every solution we made and now our company’s website is show 100% performance, check it out at NewJawa.co.uk

Hye Kathryn! I would like to say thanks for this priceless article. I have done lots of things to increase my website speed but still got nothing helpful. Now, I’m gonna try your way. Let’s see the result.

Thanks a milion of that article, please advise if there is any site could make analysis of the my site yallabook.com and advise how to speed it, it takes more than 9 sec. my web developer say it fine but i feel something wrong.

Hi Amr. I agree with you that 9 seconds is long and you do need to try to speed up your site. It’s difficult to assess what’s wrong, though, from the front end. So many of the things that slow down a site have to do with the code, image sizes, and hosting. To start, I’d check on a content deliver network and image sizes. Good luck!

Speed is critical. Everyone likes things fast. Why the wait? Speed optimizing any website will give it an extra edge over its competition. I always implement speed optimization to all my clients regardless if they pay for it or not.Speed optimizing a website should be essential but not all web developers are implemtenting such practice. Would this also effect ranking? I do think that google may consider this as part of their ranking algorithm.

Sebastian, you’re right about the importance of site speed–and I love that you optimize for it even if it wasn’t paid for. It is one of the things Google uses to evaluate a site, so it matters more than some may think. Thanks for joining the conversation!

My only tip to anyone willing to speed up their blog is to make use of the Minify-feature found in the W3 Total Cache plugin for WordPress.
Also make sure you try out cSprites for WordPress.
Thanks you for sharing own thinking

Hi Kathryn,
Thanks for sharing this wonderfull and knowledeble article. I have applied all of your tips suggested and it really helps me to Increase my site performance and speed.
🙂
Thanks & Regards
Sandeep

Hi Anchit. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. If you have a WordPress website (or something similar), your stylesheet is built into the template, and unless you’ve added something else, it’s your only stylesheet. When you want to change the appearance of your site, the recommendation is that you make changes to that file rather than putting in-line code in your pages. That extra code, whether in-line or in a second stylesheet, can slow down your site. If you want to learn more about it, I can recommend a book I’ve used: HTML5 and CSS3. For quick reference, I go to W3schools.

Hi guys,
Have been reading up on all your posts, they seem very well informed comments.

Could anyone recommend a company that specialises in website speed performance that optimizes a website to dramatically improve performance. I need help as I’m not technically inclined and all of this sounds rather technical.

For anyone that wants to take a look at my site, it’s http://www.abcenglish.nl Would appreciate all the feedback I can get

I have noted that in responsive websites, we do not need a attribute to identify mobile equivalents since the URLs remain the same. Am I right? Or, shall i still incorporate this tag in responsive sites?

Nice article. Just wanted to add a few points about image optimisation.

“Crop your images to the correct size. For instance, if your page is 570px wide, resize the image to that width. Don’t just upload a 2000px-wide image and set the width parameter (width=”570”). This slows your page load time and creates a bad user experience.”

These days we have responsive image techniques which you didn’t mention. Responsive image techniques are increasingly becoming important (and preferred) due to increasing mobile device usage.

“JPEG is your best option.”

I don’t agree JPEG is simply the best option in every case. Sometimes it’s better to use PNG-24 (and then using a tool like TinyPNG to reduce the file size) especially where maintaining a high image quality is more of a concern. Remember, JPEG uses lossy compression, and PNG uses lossless compression. One example use case for this would be photography portfolios.

“GIFs should only be used for small or simple graphics (less than 10×10 pixels, or a color palette of 3 or fewer colors) and for animated images.”

I also disagree with the idea that GIFs are best used with graphics smaller than 10x10px or with 3 or fewer colours. GIF can be used for any size as long as there isn’t any need for transparency, and provided the graphic in question doesn’t require more than 256 colours. I’ve personally found through comparision, sometimes GIFs still end up being a smaller file size than PNG-8s even after using a PNG optimisation tool. But this will vary, so it’s best to check each time.

There are workarounds for supporting PNG with old browsers like IE6 or below.

It also helps to use the CSS sprite technique where smaller graphics (logo, icons, buttons, etc) are combined into one big file, and then positioned as required via CSS positioning. This reduces HTTP requests, which in turn improves page speed. To make this easier, there are online tools that allow you to upload a file containing combined graphics, and then they output the necessary CSS. SpriteCow is one such tool.

Hi Kathryn,
Very detailed article on speeding up websites! I’ve already implemented many of the tips like reducing HTTP requests, browser caching, using minify setting etc. still sometimes images slow down my site! as you said, we can’t ignore even a millisecond!
thanks for sharing!

Hi Adithya. Sounds like you’re doing a lot of things right. (I’m impressed!) Have you tried the plugin Smush.it? I’ve heard people say it can make a big difference–if images are the issue, at any rate. Good luck!

Great post Kathryn
And a topic I love dearly. In fact I send subscribers to my blog 5 emails, one per week, showing them how to implement some of these very tips (usually the easy ones) so they can really reduce and measure their load speed.
I agree that it is really important, and Google uses it to rank pages too
thanks
ashley

Thanks, Ashley. Site speed really is a critical issue, especially since people have less and less patience with slow sites. Some of these tips are complicated–but the good news is, you can see real results doing just the simple ones.

Thanks for linking back to our blog at globaldots.com/blog/ – you can find a ton of additional web-performance related topics. Website speed influences both conversions and rankings, so it’s imperative that every website is as fast as possible. Feel free to explore the posts and quote some of the findings.